Convened by Atlantic Black Box, in partnership with The Third Place, Bomazeen Land Trust, and Maine Maritime Museum
Full-day Walk reaches capacity, afternoon registration now open for October 18 gathering at Maine Maritime Museum
Sunday, October 18
Afternoon program: 1–4 pm
Maine Maritime Museum, Bath
Registration required • Lunch included
On Sunday, October 18, hundreds of people will gather in Bath for Interco(a)stal: Reading Between the Ribs of Maine’s Maritime History, a daylong journey through history, art, performance, place, and public memory.
Registration for the full Interco(a)stal Walk has now reached our capacity of 300 participants. We’re thrilled by the response and we’ve opened additional registration for those who would like to join us for the afternoon program at Maine Maritime Museum from 1–4 pm.
Reading between the ribs
Interco(a)stal is a yearlong, place-based historical recovery and public art initiative convened by Atlantic Black Box in partnership with The Third Place, Maine Maritime Museum, and Bomazeen Land Trust, alongside a wide network of researchers, artists, museums, historical societies, and community partners.
The project asks what becomes visible when we look again at one of Maine’s most celebrated maritime landscapes.
Bath is widely known as the City of Ships, and its shipbuilding legacy has long been told through stories of ingenuity, industry, commerce, and maritime achievement. Interco(a)stal expands that frame, bringing into view histories and relationships that have often been overlooked, obscured, or separated from the places where they unfolded.
Through archival research, community knowledge, artistic practice, and public engagement, participants have been exploring histories of Wabanaki homelands and waterways, colonization, slavery and Atlantic commerce, Black maritime life, migration and diaspora, shipbuilding and labor, extraction and ecological change, resistance, and public memory.
Some of this work focuses directly on the Wyoming, the enormous six-masted schooner built in Bath in 1909 and now evoked by the skeletal sculpture at Maine Maritime Museum. Other projects use Bath’s maritime landscape as an opening into much broader histories extending along Maine’s coast and across the Atlantic world.
Together, the project asks: What else becomes visible when we read between a ship’s ribs?
Join us for the afternoon
Those joining us from 1–4 pm at Maine Maritime Museum will encounter a rich cross-section of the work that has emerged over the course of the project.
We’ll begin with a shared lunch featuring foodways connected to the histories explored through Interco(a)stal, along with opportunities to meet project partners and community organizations.
Across the museum grounds, visitors will then encounter art installations, performances, poetry, music, historical interpretation, augmented reality experiences, and participatory activities created by Interco(a)stal researchers and artists.
The afternoon will culminate at the monumental Wyoming evocation, where we’ll collectively explore what it might mean not simply to preserve a monument, but to activate it — opening it to new stories, new questions, and new relationships with the past.
Interco(a)stal brings together the work of six museums and historical societies, 14 researchers and community knowledge keepers, and 20 artists, including the creators of 15 augmented reality experiences that will allow participants to encounter layers of history embedded in the landscape around them.
